You like to start small and add resources as you need for new application deployments. Your Hortonworks cluster needs to grow due to expanding usage. You want to add more DataNodes. With ROBIN, it is as easy as adjusting the brightness of your smartphone.

Without ROBIN, you’ll have to bring up new containers with DataNode image, attach storage volumes to it. Write scripts to register the new containers as DataNodes with Ambari so YARN and HDFS are aware of the new addition. But wait, what if your DataNode requires data-locality (i.e., the storage volumes should reside on the same node where the container is brought up to minimize network hops and increase performance), how would you ensure this in Kubernetes which doesn’t understand and orchestrate storage? And what if you placed your original DataNodes across multiple racks to tolerate full rack failures. You’ll have to write up complex label selectors in Kubernetes to ensure that that constraint is not violated when you add the new DataNode. This will take you hours if not days. That’s for adding one DataNode. Now imagine the pain if you had to grow your Hortonworks cluster by adding a full-rack worth of new DataNodes at a time!

With ROBIN, you can simply add more worker nodes using 1-click operations. Because ROBIN understands your application it will learn the data-locality, affinity and anti-affinity constraints from the running Hortonworks cluster and automatically bring up the new DataNodes in compliance with those policies. ROBIN’s also automatically registers the new DataNode with your running Hortonworks cluster. All with a single click. Life couldn’t be simpler!